China’s president Xi Jinping has transformed China at home and abroad with a speed and assertiveness that few anticipated when he came to power in 2012. Finally he is meeting resistance both at home among disgruntled officials and disillusioned technocrats and abroad from an emerging group of nations that are pushing back against China’s geopolitical and high-tech expansion.

With the United States and China at loggerheads, Richard McGregor outlines Xi’s rise and the backlash in his Lowy Institute Paper, Xi Jinping: The Backlash, published by Penguin Random House Australia.

To mark the launch of the paper, Richard McGregor speaks in conversation with Lowy Institute Research Fellow Lydia Khalil.

Speakers

Richard McGregor is the Lowy Institute Senior Fellow and a leading expert on China’s political system and Asian geopolitics. He is the award-winning author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers and Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century.

Lydia Khalil is a Research Fellow in the West Asia Program at the Lowy Institute. She has a broad range of policy, academic and private sector experience, and has spent her career focusing on the intersection between governance and security — whether it be understanding the rationales behind terrorism and counterinsurgency, how to create governance systems that lead to functioning societies, effective policing strategies or the security and policy effects of new technology. She is currently a director of Arcana Partners, a strategic consultancy firm.